I have a master’s degree in urban design and work as a professional city planner. (But I'm here because I'm also a novelist - it's what I can't let go of.) I write about relationships, about people and their places (physical and not). I'm a watcher, a thinker, a feeler, a writer. ... I watch; I think; I feel; I write. Then I change every word. Strike it all. Hate it all. Hate myself. Hate writing. Wish I was smarter, more creative, a better person. I go for a walk, watch a movie, think about moving to Maui, Madrid, Mexico City. I listen to Sigur Ros or Radiohead or The National or Damien Rice or Red House Painters. I read other novelists, award winners, dejected idiots; I read an adventure story, a love story. I read something about real life: a history of the world; European imperialism through ecological domination; the global arms race. I watch CBC. I listen to the stories being told; I watch them. I think about these and feel them and like how I feel and think about how I feel and feel more and then I scratch a note down, a random thought, or just a word, arrows to connect disparate images, and then I connect them to form a sentence, a paragraph, a story, a novel, a best-seller, a Booker award winner, a Pulitzer and then I hate every.single.word again. Repeat.

I'm writing a three- (four?) part novel series about a broken heart love story (think Karl ove Knausgaard).

Novel one: The Undergraduates (available)

Novel two: How Soon We Fall From Love (available)

Novel three: A Delicate Separation (forthcoming)

From Novel 1, The Undergraduates:

Karen’s on her stomach, eyes closed but awake, one leg exposed from under my covers. A naked back, dark skin. Her arms under my white pillow and her black hair volcanic ash giving body to a glacier. I’m on the edge of my bed, at her feet, staring out my third floor window. It’s humid, but not hot. Clouds, but long shadows. Traffic in the streets. A crane in the distance hoisting metal girders. An apartment building hiding the evening sun. A child on the street hollering, a happy cheer. It’s late summer.

She comes here, most weeks, up the stairs, down the hallway, into my bedroom, on top of me. She comes to be something more than what she is. I am what she needs me to be. I escape my past; Karen escapes her husband.
She rolls over. “I should get going?”
I turn my head sideways to her. “Okay.”
“… See you soon?”
“I’ll be at work tomorrow.”
“Me too.”
“Okay.”